As Traverse City residents debate plans for a new overnight shelter, some members of the homeless community feel they’ve gotten a bad rap. Some of the volunteers who work with them agree.
“We could not continue our program in our church building if this community of people was as violent and as dangerous as some people in the city have imagined,” Central United Methodist Church Member Sandra McDonald told a crowd last week at the Traverse Area District Library.
“I would invite anyone who is interested to come to our outreach breakfast at Central Church on Monday between 8:30 and 10:30, when my husband and I will be serving as volunteers, and meet some of these people who will be coming to Safe Harbor.”
IPR took her up on the offer.
“Brother’s Keeper”
For nearly a decade, Sandra McDonald has been volunteering with the homeless of Traverse City, the people here in this room. They come seven days a week for breakfast, perhaps and shower and to check their mail or watch morning television.
Randy Parcher,55, is someone you might have run into at Christmastime, ringing a Salvation Army bell. He shows off some of his artwork – detailed pen-and-ink drawings depicting life on the street.
“This fellow here is actually a composite of a couple homeless,” Parcher begins to describe a drawing he titled My Brother’s Keeper. “Why it’s My Brother’s Keeper is because there’s another fellow, and in the summer he will go around and say, ‘Have you seen so-and-so?’ If no one has seen him in a few days, he’ll go find him.”
It’s a fictitious scene, but it shows how Parcher, after years of living out of a car, sees the homeless in Traverse City as a community that looks out for one another.
Contrasting Media Accounts
His reality is a sharp contrast, he says, to accounts of homeless people on TV, and in other media.
“The way the homeless are portrayed – they really do a lot of times propagate the myths of how the homeless are. So the perceptions of the general public are what they see there,” he says.
Some of them make it bad for everybody. But there's a lot of good people here. --Suzanne Webster
Parcher has also been paying close attention to debate in Traverse City over the proposed Safe Harbor homeless shelter, and he wants people to know this population is not particularly violent, nor a danger to children.
McDonald agrees. She says she has never once felt afraid in her years of volunteering.
“Just because someone’s homeless, they’re not a pedophile,” she says. “Because someone’s homeless and/or has mental health issues that doesn’t mean that they are violent.
“Probably most of the people we see with mental health issues are very quiet and withdrawn, but not violent.”
That McDonald, and other volunteers, are speaking up means something to the guests here like Joe, the 30-year-old man who prompted McDonald to speak.
“That mean’s that there are people out there that care,” he says. “And – it’s amazing, it’s helpful. And I feel grateful that they’re doing that.”
Nuisance Concerns
Joe has been homeless, he says, for two years now. He did not want to give his last name. He says he understands some of the neighborhood concerns, most of which have not focused on violent crime, but on vagrancy and property values.
Traverse City Police are in daily contact with some people who are homeless. At a crowded meeting last week, Captain Jeff O’Brien said problems are mostly nuisance concerns and medical issues.
“I would always ride my motorcycle back by Oryana,” he gives an example from his days on patrol. “I’d go up over the bridge. If there were people that were back there, they were drinking, I’d ask them to move along. The biggest problem we have back there is kids jumping off the bridge.”
O’Brien says of the nearly 100 people living on the street in Traverse City, the police generally see only a few people, chronically.
Back at Central Church, breakfast is done and Suzanne Webster helps by wiping down tables. She stays at the Goodwill Inn.
“Some of them make it bad for everybody,” she says of the people in the room. “But there’s a lot of good people here. They just, something happened in life and they end up homeless and jobs are – you know what the jobs scene has been.”